This chapter contains sensitive topics, touching on love and intimacy. There is no explicit content, only deeply emotional experiences that carry particular meaning in light of the journey as a whole. One promise of this story is to address the cardinal questions that we face, and I fully believe that love and how we practice it is the stuff of life. There are no names or pictures of people, but whatever you see for yourself is a version of the truth.
Vrnjacka Banja, Serbia. June 28 to 30.
I waited outside the grocery store as per our arrangement. She was late, and since I didn't have data being outside the EU with no local SIM, there was nothing to do but to remain patient, and trusting.
Eventually she did show, me sitting in the corner of the parking lot. In the most noticeable way, she showed from the start that she sought closeness and connection, touching my shoulder and arm whenever there was a chance to affirm me in any way, if only to raise from the curb. I was surprised and a bit taken aback by her early advances, neither avoidant or responsive. "I will let the situation unfold", I thought.
Looking back, writing this more than two months after it happened, I cannot stress the importance of timing enough. Had this very same meeting occurred one month later, my response would have been very different, likely returning her desperate outreach with equal fragility. In fact, I was probably in as much need for close contact as she was, I simply didn't know it yet. Had I been able to peer into the near future, I probably would have embraced her right then and there. But I didn't.
We sat at the garden table as she told her story. Of the childhood during the civil war, when her parents smuggled goods to feed their kids. Of being bullied by the teachers simply for fleeing from Bosnia, even as ethnic Serbians. Of her high academic performance, the fruit of which she had yet to see. Of her brother who gambled away the family money, yet always seemed to resent her. Of her escape from conventions and stability, soaring high in the sky all over the world. Of her eventual crash, fall into addiction and depression. Of her temporary solution to move back to her parents to find footing, now six years and counting with no change in sight.
"Working is good, it gives me some structure and purpose. I get to be playful with kids." She looked at me. "And sex really helps. It's amazing how much it helps."
There was a longing in her look that ached inside me. Some say that eyes speak of a person's sex life. I can't make any such claims, but there is an unmistakable pull in a woman's eyes when she is asking for love, a growing void with increasing gravity. It takes courage, desperation or both to be that vulnerable. As a man who above all wants to give of my gifts, love being the most powerful of them all, failing to oblige such a request was pure pain. Yet, my truth at the time was clear. I couldn't give her all that she wanted, and I was afraid to cause further damage by only sharing a taste of it. As for myself, I was day by day working towards something, and someone, else.
There had formed a plan to be accompanied from Budapest to Vienna, starting July 9. Outspoken there was only travelling companionship and no intimate partnership involved in that arrangement, but I naively thought that history would repeat itself. It did, it most definitely did, only in a way I did not imagine at all as you will find out as the story unfolds. For now, in Vrnjacka Banja, Serbia, I was thinking of another and thus couldn't even realise her wishes of simply being loved.
On the second day, in the early evening, I spoke to my mother on the phone. As the minutes went by, I suspected that my host and friend might feel lonely, and just then loud music was heard from inside the house, so much that I had to walk away to finish the call. Once I returned, same song still playing, there was something off about it. A sound that didn't fit in the mix and the beat. It took me a few moments to identify it as a voice, a scream. Not a shrieking howl that cuts through the air, but a roaring cry that blasts through the walls. It was like a siren that calls an emergency, only it was a human voice. She was crying her whole body inside out, and I had no idea how to respond.
After being told off at first, I couldn't bear hearing her from inside her closed door, each convulsion stabbing my heart. I was eventually let inside, holding her as she calmed down.
"Now I remember why I smoked so much", she managed to squeeze out through the sobs. "My friends tell me I became like this because of the weed, but I was smoking to escape this."
That night, I declined her request to share my bed. None of her approaches were inconsiderate, insensitive, or disrespectful, and she never insisted when I hesitated. Me thinking and speaking well of her didn't ease her pain, that I knew. But I did not know that I would soon be in her shoes. That I would be the one to crash, to loose footing, to cry for help, for love.
By refusing her in her weak state, I felt proud. I thought I had proven a strength to myself, that I had passed some kind of test showing I was neither dumb nor desperate. Little did I understand then that, in equal measure, I was both. And so I continued cycling early next morning, eyes forward, into the silent fog that often follows rainy days.
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